Green Healthcare News

September 2018

Yale surgeons make sustainability and wellness a focus
These surgeon’s impact has gone beyond the scale of individual lives, and bring impact to the environment to attention. Surgeons Dr. Glenda Callender and Dr. Hulda Einarsdottir tackle sustainability issues in their department.

More US hospitals go green to stay out of the red
The healthcare sector is responsible for nearly 10 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions - hundreds of millions of tons worth of carbon each year. Many hospitals are wising up and reaping the benefits of taking a green approach.

Nursing the environment
Beth Schenk, Ph.D., MHI, RN-BC, has received honors for her incentives toward environmental sustainability in the healthcare industry- and lists a few things nurses can do to help the environment.

Hospital design and its influence on patient care
It used to be common practice to treat patients in large, long wards. Today, for infection control purposes, newer hospitals tend to feature single patient rooms. Today, the health care team encourages a family member to spend the night by the child’s bedside.

Solar Power Super Charges Cost Savings and Energy Efficiency for Hospitals
Energy conservation is a high priority in an industry that spends billions on facilities and equipment to keep pace with patient needs. Innovative healthcare organizations such as CentraState are finding ways to reduce their energy consumption and costs by deploying technologies to improve efficiency.

Energy Efficiency Saves live, Avoids Huge Health Costs
How would our health benefit if every state and major city across the country reduced its annual electricity consumption by 15 percent? Achievable and commonsense energy efficiency measures could help save six American lives every day and avoid up to US$20 billion in health harms each year.

The American Center Earns Gold Environmental Certification
UW Health at The American Center has earned LEED Gold Certification- making it the first healthcare building in the state of Wisconsin to do so. “Promoting healthy buildings can support the health of people around them,” Evers Statz, director of sustainability for UW Health, said.

RGH Pilot Program Lets You Mail Leftover Drugs to be Destroyed
Once or twice a week, someone at Rochester General Hospital asks where they can safely get rid of unwanted medication. As part of Rochester Regional’s sustainability initiative, its flagship hospital is part of a six-month pilot program to reduce the public health and environmental impact of unused prescription and over-the-counter medication.

Efficiency of Buildings Increase, with a Focus on Facility Managers
In 2010, the U.S. building sector generated 45 percent of all carbon dioxide emissions in the country. Much of this is because of the fact that residential and commercial buildings use 75 percent of all electricity produced in the U.S., for lighting, pumping, heating and cooling.

FDA Restricts Healthcare Hand Soap Chemicals
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration restricted the use of triclosan and 23 other ingredients in antiseptic washes and rubs effective December 2018, citing a “lack of sufficient safety and efficacy data.”

A New Remedy: Introducing Biophilic Design into Hospitals
Biophilic is derived from the term, “biophilia,” meaning “the urge to affiliate with other forms of life.” This term introduces the idea of incorporating natural materials, light, views and vegetation into the modern world and modern medical environments.

January 2018

How Drugged-up Shellfish Help Scientists Understand Human Pollution
Every Advil you pop or antidepressant you swallow is processed in your body and excreted, often as chemical byproducts that can still affect other organisms.In their quest to understand the effects of drugs on marine life, however, scientists have found an involuntary ally: shellfish.

2017: The Year the Climate Change Came Home
It’s increasingly clear that we can no longer support healthy people on a sick planet.” Health care providers are taking heroic steps to address the collective trauma our communities are enduring.

The Case for Energy Saving Retrofits
Retrofitting smart technology to commercial buildings can cut energy bills by 8 percent in hospitals. Explore the cost and benefits of a wide range of options that are open to building owners and managers now. Tech that includes, occupancy sensors, smart thermostats, demand-controlled ventilation, electronic films for windows, and much more.

December 2017

The US health care industry could learn a lot from India’s doctors
According to one study, the health care sector accounts for 10 percent of carbon pollution in the U.S.The medical industry produces plenty of waste from treatments, tossing disposable gowns, caps, booties, gloves and blankets, in addition to using loads of energy to drive machines needed in diagnosis and surgery.

Hospitals are scrambling to solve their air pollution issue
Carbon dioxide is perhaps the most famous climate-changing chemical, but some of the gases used to knock people out in the operating room are many times more potent. In the United Kingdom, the National Health Services estimates that anesthesia alone accounts for around 5 percent of the carbon footprint of the health care system.

A hospital without patients
Doctors and nurses sit at carrels in front of monitors that include camera-eye views of the patients and their rooms, graphs of their blood chemicals and images of their lungs and limbs, and lists of problems that computer programs tell them to look out for. The nurses wear scrubs, but the scrubs are very, very clean. The patients are elsewhere.

Hospitals are helping make us all sick
As temperatures go up due to climate change, extreme weather events become more frequent, and more intense. The changing climate is making people sick. Between powering facilities, manufacturing medical supplies, creating pharmaceuticals, and other activities, the U.S. healthcare system is responsible for a solid chunk of the greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change.

Sustainability tips and using greywater properly
One of the many ways commercial facilities are reducing water consumption is to use greywater. While some greywater may look discolored, even “dirty,” it is usually safe, even beneficial to use to irrigate vegetation, even though it should not be used for human consumption.

Tips to reduce facility waste
The U.S. EPA reports that each person creates an average of 4.4 pounds of waste per day. To reduce the environmental impact facilities have on the environment, and to elevate some of the work from custodial staffs, businesses are making some changes to their waste management programs.

Hospitals are working to change by growing their own produce
High atop the roof of a hospital power plant in the middle of the city, farm manager Lindsay Allen is on her hands and knees, cutting sprays of leafy greens and arugula and packing them into boxes. These particular greens will go to the Boston Medical Center kitchen, where they will be prepared for use in the cafeteria salad bar.

October 2017

48 environmental rules on the way out
Since taking office in January, President Trump has made eliminating federal regulations a priority. His administration has often targeted environmental rules it sees as overly burdensome to the fossil fuel industry. According to this New York Times analysis, the administration has sought to reverse nearly 50 environmental rules.

High-performance Buildings Zero in on Zero-Net Energy
State and local regulations are driving new building construction as well as existing buildings to implement energy-efficient technologies in order to meet future carbon emissions reduction goals. These facilities, known as high-performance buildings, strive to deliver optimal efficiency, reliability, value and comfort to tenants.

Boston Medical Center Rooftop Farm concludes 1st season
Boston Medical Center has transformed the once barren roof on top of its power plant building into the largest rooftop farm in that city. This past summer, the 7,000 square feet of growing space flourished with fresh produce, including arugula, bok choy, radishes, Swiss chard and kale.

HHA offers hurricane guidance to health care facilities
With Florida still reeling from the effects of Hurricane Irma, a federal agency within the Department of Health and Human Services has issued draft guidance to help healthcare facilities with disaster planning and recovery for major hurricanes.

Designing buildings for an uncertain future
Winners of Modern Healthcare’s 32nd annual Design Awards are at the forefront of two major industry trends: building flexible spaces that can withstand dramatic changes to the healthcare delivery model and re-connecting patients and their providers to nature in environmentally friendly facilities.

Tapping into water conservation strategies
Health care facilities are the third-largest water consumers of all buildings in the United States, according to the Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star data, and are responsible for 7 percent of water use among all commercial buildings.

Anesthesia providers go green
One of the paradoxes of the medical marvel known as general anaesthesia is that in helping us to get well, those anaesthetic gases are also heating our planet. Now, a remedy may be at hand in the form of an innocuous-looking white powder…

Something’s cooking at hospital farmers market
The salad that Raquel Rivera-Pablo whipped together outside St. Vincent’s Medical Center Tuesday afternoon was a symphony of color. “Look how pretty this salad is,” Rivera-Pablo declared to a crowd gathered to watch her cook. “And there’s not much to it.” And that was roughly the point of her cooking exhibition — that eating healthy needn’t be difficult nor expensive.

That drug expiration date may be more myth than fact
The box of prescription drugs had been forgotten in a back closet of a retail pharmacy for so long that some of the pills predated the 1969 moon landing. Could these drugs from the bell-bottom era still be potent?

5 tips to maximize the benefits of SUD reprocessing
A reprocessed device can provide a significant savings, some up to 50 percent, compared to a new device. As a result, many hospitals save between half a million and a million dollars a year. Some save even more.

The dishonest HONEST Act
More subtle and dangerous are attempts in Congress to undermine public health and environmental protections by limiting the use of scientific evidence under the guise of increased transparency.

Smart Buildings: Giving Buildings Consciousness
More than 130 years after Edison’s bright idea transformed society and workplace productivity, lighting technology is being revolutionized. This time, it’s not just about bulbs. The transformation, in the words of one lighting-technology executive, “will give buildings consciousness.”

Health Leaders Must Focus on the Threats From Factory Farms
This week, the World Health Organization — which works globally to improve human health — will meet in Geneva to select a new director general. We have a mission for that leader: take on factory farms, a major threat to health and the environment.

Lead-Contaminated Drinking Water Goes Far Beyond Flint
In fact, 63 percent of Americans worry “a great deal” about polluted drinking water, and ranked it as more concerning than air pollution, climate change and the extinction of plant and animal species, according to a Gallup poll conducted in March.

Use sustainable landscaping for a positive mark
There are ways to use resources more efficiently and cut back on energy consumption inside, of course, but one eco-friendly idea for businesses exists that you might not have considered: sustainable landscaping.

Designs That Heal
Healthcare designers and researchers are starting to ask what they can do to better support patients, staff, and families in these settings.

Medical supply surpluses a common source of hospital waste
Much has been made about the costliness of the American healthcare system, but one factor that may be driving up medical costs is the prevalence of “medical surplus,” essentially usable supplies that hospitals discard when new equipment comes in…

Protecting world’s most vulnerable populations from climate change
Many lessons for addressing the effects of climate change were shared throughout the course of the Climate & Health Meeting, held Feb. 16 at the Carter Center in Atlanta, and one panel discussed ways we can find solutions from a less obvious source: low- and middle-income countries.

Renewable NRG producing 100 percent of energy on-site
Vermont Business Magazine Renewable NRG Systems (RNRG) has added two fixed solar arrays to its LEED Gold-certified headquarters in Hinesburg, allowing the company to meet all of its electricity needs with on-site, renewable energy.

On the light track to improved design for healthcare
As a member of the Light and Health Alliance, USAI Lighting recently worked with Mariana Figueiro, Program Director at the Lighting Research Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, to stay up to date with research findings from the latest metric in lighting (and health), Circadian Stimulus (CS).

‘Green’ Buildings May Boost Productivity, Cut Down on Sick Days
A series of new studies, led by Harvard University and SUNY Upstate Medical University, found that occupants of high-performing green buildings showed higher cognitive function scores, fewer sick-building symptoms and higher sleep quality scores than workers in high-performing buildings without green certification.

Women bear the brunt of climate-forced migration
Climate Change Knows no Borders, prepared by ActionAid, Climate Action Network South Asia and Bread for the World (Brot Fuer Die Welt) calls on national policymakers to especially monitor impacts of climate-induced migration on women and urgently address the policy gap.

Hospital touts success of recycling program
The San Juan Regional Medical Center has been actively working on reducing its carbon footprint since 2007, a hospital officials says, resulting in a reduction of 200 tons of waste taken to the landfill each year and a total savings of $2 million to the hospital.

Tunable LED patient-room lighting offers energy efficiency, more
With the help of Department of Energy (DOE) funding, Philips Lighting Research North America is developing an innovative prototype LED patient-suite lighting system that’s not only energy-efficient, but also goes beyond meeting the visual needs of patients, caregivers and visitors to also meet their nonvisual needs.

Greenhealth Cost of Ownership Calculator
Practice Greenhealth and our partners have developed the the Greenhealth Cost of Ownership (GCO) Calculator that brings the hidden costs of various medical devices to the surface.

Google will soon deliver on 100% renewables promise
Sometime within the next 12 months, internet search and cloud services giant Google will be buying enough clean power on an ongoing basis to account for the electricity needs of both its 13 data centers (so far) and offices in more than 150 cities around the world.

The power of climate-competent boards
Tangible action that locks us into a net zero greenhouse gas emissions trajectory, as quickly as possible, is more vital than ever. But just as Paris entered into force, the geo-political landscape shifted dramatically.

EU unveils plans to boost ‘clean energy’ use
The EU on Wednesday unveiled “clean energy” plans to boost renewable use, cut waste and reduce subsidies for coal power in a bid to meet its commitments to the Paris climate deal.

Cracking the code for small hospital sustainability
Limited financial resources and geographic locations can make it challenging for community hospitals to remain sustainable in an environment of competition for providers and physicians while offering scaled-down services.

Get Smart About Antibiotics Week: Clinician Storytelling
For Get Smart Week 2016, Health Care Without Harm and the Clinician Comprehensive Antibiotic Stewardship (CCCAS) Collaborative have collected stories from clinicians about their experience with antibiotic resistance to motivate transformative policy change.

Research Shows That OR Waste Prevention Strategies Add Up
Researchers at the UCSF Department of Neurosurgery studied 58 neurosurgery procedures and found that these cases wasted an average of $653 in unused disposable surgical supplies. That added up to $968 per case or $2.9 million per year.

Food Day Recipe Challenge
Every October 24, Food Day inspires Americans to resolve to make changes in our own diets and to take action to solve food-related problems in our communities at the local, state, and national level.